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Translation of Eric Mottram's The Nerves of Proust and Sitting Bull by T. Wignesan

Excerpts from an article, “From space to caves in the heart recreating the collective world in Eric Mottram’s poetry” by Clive Bush, Director of American Studies, King’s College, University of London in The Journal of Comparative Poietics, Vol. I, Nos. 2 & 3 (Paris), 1990/1991, pp. 48-49. Editor: T. Wignesan:

“In Mottram’s work there is no illusion that poetry will save us. Nonetheless a commitment to a poetry of intelligence with its necessarily radical and varied forms, to a clear-eyed and non-moralistic politics, to celebration of non-dogmatic forms of life, and to creativity and its happiness, at least rehearses the possibility of choice rather than submission. It is as necessary a task for Mottram as it was for Shelley in the era of the Peterloo massacre, or Swinburne observing Disraeli’s absurd antics in relation to the Ottoman Empire. Certainly the difficulty is all the greater for Mottram in the sense that there is no “good place” for committed creative intelligence.  (…) Mottram expands his frame of reference far beyond officially-recognised English poetic practice in order paradoxically to recover the actual and multiple richnesses of English cultural traditions currently betrayed by the know-nothing, pseudo-lyrical confessions of poets who mistakenly think their personal lives interesting enough to record in immediately comprehensible invariably tear-stained and melancholy mediocrity. The “immediately comprehensible” flatters a populace whose intelligence has been undermined by an autocratic State paranoid about criticism…”


Les nerfs de Proust et de Sitting Bull

	comme une guérison pour l’original 
			tissu fin
         	qu’il a mis des bouchons d’ivoire
			dans ses oreilles
	  avalait presque n’importe quoi
			créa sa
	scène inoffensive et l’appela la mémoire
	   pour honorer la divinité une centaines 
			de pièces de
    peau lesquelles furent presque arrachées de ses bras
			qu’il gagne
	   le triple farce de désobéissance 
	          	qu’il donne quelque chose  
	pour le reporter de Tribune de New York afin qu’il perde
	 la mémoire pèse pour réaliser un massacre
			sur les nerfs qui
se sentaient une guerre Franco-Prussienne et commençaient à périr
			dès le début 
ainsi le passé d’une détaille urbaine voyageait comme le culte d’une cargaison
			les Sioux donnèrent nos
        jeunes américains qui rêvent d’un dernier bastion

(from Eric Mottram. the he expression. London: Aloes Books, 1973, p. 49)

(c) T. Wignesan,  Paris,  2017
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